pfSense Digest

Main conrainer

Netgate®, the leading provider of open source security solutions and the host of the pfSense® open source firewall project is proud to announce the availability of professional 24×7 support for pfSense software.

Our new extended support hours are available to all customers who have active pfSense software support incidents on their account. Support incidents are available both for pfSense hardware purchased from Netgate and for customers who have installed pfSense CE on their own hardware.

Customers with active support incidents on their account are eligible to use telephone, chat and email to initiate a support request. With our new level of staffing and capability, we’re also happy to announce a reduction in our initial response service level agreement (SLA) from 24 hours to 8 hours.

NEAR-FUTURE PLANS

In the next few months, Netgate will further refine the professional support model for pfSense software. This new support model will include three Enterprise level support options with initial response times of 2, 4 and 8 hours, varying methods of requesting support (phone, chat, e-mail), advanced hardware replacement, complimentary professional services consultation, training discounts, and more depending on the level of support selected.

Once our new support options are launched, sales of new support incidents will cease. Any existing support incidents held by the customer will be honored. Support incidents are valid for up to one year from purchase date and are non-refundable.

While you are planning for the next level in our comprehensive 2017 support offering, you may purchase support incidents here!

JUST THE BOOK!

Several customers and community members have requested access to The pfSense Book separate from the additional features of the pfSense Gold subscription. In order to celebrate the launch of 24×7 support, we are announcing a new, lower price for the HTML version of The pfSense Book, by Christopher M. Buechler and Jim Pingle, which you may purchase here.

Starting today, a one-year subscription to the online edition of the official pfSense book can be purchased for $24.70/year. Customers who purchase a pfSense appliance from Netgate will continue to receive complimentary access to the book.

As we look back over the last ten years, we are in awe of the diverse group of highly motivated individuals who have collaboratively assembled into the pfSense community. We at Netgate would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the pfSense community, and especially all of our customers, large and small, for continuing to make pfSense a growing, sustainable, open source project.

This month marks 10 years since the pfSense 1.0 Open Source firewall and router software distribution hit the Internet. With that release, one of the most successful open-source projects was born. Over the last 10 years, pfSense software has amassed a following and installed base of nearly 400,000. This is an amazing accomplishment by an open source project and it would not have been possible without the interest, engagement, and support of the entire pfSense community. This community includes the contributions of many developers, the support and funding by the host company Netgate, our customers, and the innumerable contributions by those who assist others on the forum or on IRC, have filed bug reports and followed up to test the relevant fixes, tested beta builds and release candidates, created or edited documentation, or written articles on how they use pfSense software. We are humbled by the interest, enthusiasm and trust that so many have for pfSense. For all of this and more, we thank you!

pfSense 2.4 will use FreeBSD 11 as a base, and 11.0-RELEASE has not yet occurred. There will be additional work to use 11.0-RELEASE as a base.

More work at “reduction of technical debt” is occurring in 2.4. We have decided to not carry forward the kernel patches for Captive Portal. Instead, it is being re-written to use stock IPFW. That work is only about 75% complete. MPD4 needs to be converted to MPD5. Simultaneously to these, work is occurring to convert several subsystems (e.g. radius) to use the PEAR equivalents:

We now use pear-XML_RPC2. As a result of the rework, you can now set a username field in HA settings to connect to the other HA partner. Previously this was always ‘admin’. The previous xmlrpc, inc, xmprpc_client.inc and xmprpc_server.inc have been removed.

With the pending departure of Chris Buechler, we wanted to find a way to express to the community our continued commitment to keep pfSense® software open source.

As such, pfSense is moving to the Apache License 2.0 in order to align the goals of the project with other (unannounced) offerings from Netgate. The Apache License 2.0 is a permissive license similar to the MIT License. The main conditions of this license require preservation of copyright and license notices.

Over the past few months, the Netgate® engineering team and our community contributors have delivered the software foundation for a new era of pfSense® technology.

In April we released version 2.3 of pfSense software which features a new, modern webGUI utilizing Bootstrap, as well as converting the underlying system to FreeBSD® pkg. The pkg conversion enables us to update pieces of the system individually going forward, rather than the monolithic updates of the past. The webGUI rewrite brings a new responsive look and feel to the pfSense project, which minimizes resizing or scrolling across a wide range of devices from desktop to mobile phones.

Since releasing pfSense 2.3 we have demonstrated both a dual Ethernet ARM device and the new dual Ethernet Minnowboard Turbot, running an experimental version of pfSense software version 2.4. We have also shown technology demonstrations of kernel bypass networking via netmap-fwd, which can yield ten-fold improvements in packet processing. Taken together, these results demonstrate the start of a new era for Netgate and pfSense.

2.3.1 Update 5 (2.3.1_5) is now available. Note that updates 2 through 4 were internal-only. This includes two security fixes to the web GUI, and 7 other bug fixes. The 2.3.1-RELEASE change list has been updated with an Update 5 section specifying the changes.

2.3.1 Update 1 (2.3.1_1) is now available. This includes one security fix to the web GUI, and 7 other bug fixes. The 2.3.1-RELEASE change list has been updated with an Update 1 section specifying the changes.

We are happy to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.3.1!

This is a maintenance release in the 2.3.x series, bringing a number of bug fixes, two security fixes in the GUI, as well as security fixes for OpenSSL, OpenVPN and FreeBSD atkbd and sendmsg. The full list of changes is on the 2.3.1 New Features and Changes page.

This release includes a total of 103 bug fixes. 79 regressions in 2.3 have been fixed, mostly minor issues in the new GUI. Several of these are significant issues, and have resolved nearly all the post-upgrade problems encountered in 2.3-RELEASE. 24 issues affecting 2.2.x and prior versions have also been fixed.